The present invention relates to semantic analysis of natural language material. More specifically, the present invention relates to the semantic analysis of a linguistic structure provided by a natural language processing system.
Many applications would benefit from a natural language interface suitable to accept and accurately process natural language inputs from a user. Such natural language systems must be robust with respect to linguistic and conceptual variation. Consequently, they must be easy to use.
For example, natural language systems must be able to accommodate modifier attachment ambiguities, quantifier scope ambiguities, conjunction and disjunction ambiguities, nominal compound ambiguities, anaphora, elliptical sentences, etc.
In prior systems, a limited amount of semantic knowledge or heuristics were used to resolve ambiguities in the natural language input. However, these approaches can be undesirably complex or inefficient.
Even assuming that a natural language expression can be subjected to natural language processing and that a linguistic structure can be developed which represents the meaning of the natural language input, major hurdles must be overcome in order to use that linguistic structure with applications that expect inputs having a specific structure. For example, many conventional applications expect information to be input in a predefined structure, but that structure often differs from application-to-application. The output of many natural language processing systems is not a structure suitable for input to such applications.
Therefore, even assuming that a linguistic structure can be developed which represents the meaning of a natural language input, that does not mean that the linguistic structure is suitable for input to an application that desires to use information represented by the natural language input.